Hammered by the financial crisis that has led to ever diminishing income, a group of residents in northern Greece have joined forces with potato farmers to slash consumer prices and ensure producers can get their crop to markets by cutting out the middle man.

Hundreds of families turned up Saturday in this northern Greek town to buy potatoes at massively reduced prices, sold directly by producers at cost price. They lined up in cars and with bicycles, on foot and with scooters to collect their bags of spuds from a truck that flung its doors wide open and was doing a roaring trade in the parking lot of a local courthouse.

Farmers say it costs about 20 cents ($0.27) to produce a kilogram (2 pounds) of potatoes, but that wholesalers will only buy them for 10-12 cents to get the crop to supermarkets, where they sell for about 60-70 cents a kilogram. Faced with making a loss, many producers say they have been unable to even get their products to the market.

That is my next upgrade. Local prices here are around $8k to sink one down to 350'.

Most everyone knows that Texas, like many other states, has the Castle Doctrine.

Yesterday, the Texas Supreme Court ruled that the water below the land you own is yours. Not someone or something who has the $$$ to buy it.

We decide in this case whether land ownership includes an interest in groundwater in place
that cannot be taken for public use without adequate compensation guaranteed by article I, section 17(a) of the Texas Constitution. We hold that it does.

The "Authority" can not tell you you can't pump from it or need a permit.

The Court said that the government cannot restrict how landowners consume the water beneath their property without compensating them.

The ruling was also a victory for Burrrell Day and Joel McDaniel who sued the Edwards Aquifer Authority after the authority attempted to regulate how they used groundwater so the water could be used downstream.

So defend the patch you call home and the same applies to the water under it.

Sorry to put this up so late (10pm eastern). Today was brutal, but I couldn’t share this Operation #EFAD task. But fortunately, this type of operation becomes self-sustaining, and does not need regular “command guidance” once set into motion.

All of the Facebook, Twitter, blog and forum activity will make its mark on Thursday, March 1, when the world at large first becomes aware of the “dangerous” novel from 2003 that foreshadowed current repulsive criminal abuses by federal law enforcement agencies, including Operation Fast And Furious.